OpenHouse #13 | Jun 2018

zondag 24 June 2018 - 14:00 > 18:30 (free)wpZimmer

Before we leave for summer holidays, we would like to open our blue portal one last time during the OpenHouse. Expect artistic interventions throughout the building, and more specifically work that questions the concept of nature.How do we relate today as a society to nature? What do we reckon as naturally?Can we have a dialogue with non-humans - and more: can we relate to them legally?During the thirteenth edition of OpenHouse, Gosie Vervloessem, Marialena Marouda, Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and Elisa Yvelin take a closer look at these topics.

Moreover, we open our new atelier which we renovate the past last months together with Tuur and Flup Marinus. It will be their permanent place and base for developing new work in the coming years. During the OpenHouse, you can visit the space
and see old and new work.

Free, with reservations by mailing at charlotte@wpzimmer.be .Some performances or try-outs have limited capacity.So if you want to be certain of your place, please give us your name + performance + hour.

Hush Hush of the Bush (work-in-progress) is a new outcome towards a video installation about Gosie Vervloessem’s research on invasive species.In this video installation, Gosie Vervloessem tells stories about her fascination about her favorite invasive species, the Japanese knotweed. During her search for stories, she has met interesting people and fascinating places. These stories constantly changed her vision of this tenacious exote – moreover, her vision of invasive species in general. What can be labeled as nature and what not? The fierce reactions that the Japanese knotweed unleashes, raise at the same time questions about categorization, mobility, migration, colonialism, horror and the secret power of plants.

“To be one at all you must be many, and that’s not a metaphor" (Donna Haraway)

During her stay in Norway, Elisa Yvelin got fascinated by lichens. These curious organismes, hovering between semi-rock and semi-plant, have a spectacular sense of sustainability through co-dependency. Lichens are like a self-contained miniature ecosystem in and of themselves. Also humans are made up of multiple separate symbiotic organisms which lead to porous, liminal and amorphous identities. In her conference/tea ritual/performance Elisa takes the spectators to the wonderful world of lichens and tries to enact a conversation between interspecies.

The Conference of the Lichens is the first part of a trilogy which deals with phenomenons of channeling and translations processes. Since 2015 Elisa has been leading a research on energetic and vernacular practices. Therefore she followed a variety of studies and courses: Kundalini (yoga), Reiki (therapy), the Methode Résseguier, phenomenology, psychology and auto-hypnosis with L’outil hypnotique amplifié transmitted by Catherine Contour.

Voice of Nature: THE TRIAL is a site-specific court piece, in which they investigate ecocide and the possibilities of making a new proposal for the justice-system. For this creation, Maria Lucia and her crew will experiment with how law and justice can serve the ecosystem by proposing a “new type of court room” and create a new form of trial in which the voice of nature can be heard. In their futuristic court, they will guide the audience through the realms of fiction, magic and reality. In response to the many legal challenges they face to represent legally nature, a transformation of the individual is needed. How would a river or a forest talk in court?

As challenging as it may, M. Lucia is undertaking a durational personification process to be the spokesperson person of nature. The process consists in one year of archiving a series of explorations and rites. This journey will become a collective one, and inspire the trial's dramaturgy and script to guide the audience through a transformative juridical ritual, in which human and non-humans will come to a new collective language.

Correia's artistic work speaks her deep engagement for environmental issues. She reacts to the ecological crimes of our times by bringing audiences into a participatory environment that connects the artistic with the voices of scientists, activists and lawyers. Her actions tackle utopian healing by proposing clinical esthetics that unveil human and non-human interconnectivity. Correia's work is informed by contemporary discourses on the anthropocene, nature colonialism, climate change legacies, pollution in urban landscapes, transition, restoration and indigeneity. Correia often proposes participatory articulations by creating autonomous and temporary platforms which often create moments of disruption and harmony between seemingly disparate, bodies of knowledge, cultural traditions, resilience, value systems and social transformation.

In Oceanographies, Marialena Marouda is interested in knowledges in the plural. She focuses particularly on those knowledges of ocean that are inherent in encountering it. The focus of her research is therefore the relation between two kinds of bodies: the human body and the vast body of water that the ocean is. It is the relation of the hands to the mud, the ears to the breaking of the waves, the feet to the feeling of sinking, that the work focuses on –rather than on the ocean “in itself”, devoid of the human presence.

The work seeks to weave the complexity that arises from those interactions into the tellings of stories of encountering the ocean -and their demonstrations. The aim is to develop a nomad oceanographic institute in which the (re-)telling of those experiences, the performing of the relationship(s) that are described, can summon or evoke the ocean. That is, performance becomes here a tool and an art-science by means of which the ocean and the researcher can be merged into a single body of water.

Marialena Marouda works in the fields of performance art and choreography. She studied philosophy and visual arts at Columbia University in New York, USA and continued her studies at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. She started developing her research project Oceanographies within the program advanced performance and scenography studies (a.pass) in Brussels –which she just concluded. She collaborates with the research platform Nadine in the framework of the Wandering Arts Biennale 2018.